About Me

My biography in full, appalling detail(http://bewrite.net/mm5/FlippingBooks/FUOPP/index.html
I was educated in paperback . M.A. (Penguin) Without punctuation or shorthand I have been a reporter and author of 26 books,largely because I went into the wrong office in the army to dodge a vengeful RSM and within an hour was on my way to cover the Berlin airlift as an army PR sergeant.Two hours after being freed from an army prison as a private (It was a bum rap but I have never ceased to be grateful,because otherwise I would be a retired bus driver now.) For fity years I also wrote newspaper columns, so many that I ws known in the trade at the Parthenon Kid. I have been atop more columns than Simon the Stylite. I was also one of the few BBC presenters who hadn't been in the Footlights. I worked for BBC Wales for 30 years and ws awarded a Golden microphone for services to broadcasting. A month later I was dropped because I was English. Which proved BBC bosses don't listen to the radio.

Friday, 30 November 2012

TIN HAT TIME

An American reader invites me to write "Skidmore’s War" to help his fellow
countrymen see those years through British eyes. Alas this Britisher's eyes are
bleary with age and dissipation and seen through any eyes my war, like the rest
of my life, is comedy to the point of farce but I will seize on anything that
takes my mind of the coming fester-ivities

SKIDMORE'S WAR

My family fought at Crecy, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Waterloo, in the Boer and Zulu Wars and World Wars One and Two, so I never really forgave Hitler
for starting his war when I was only ten and too young to join in; though I had the Martini Henry rifle my Uncle Alby used to despatch
Zulus. In my bed in Manchester I slept with it by my side longing for invasion.

I vividly remember the lovely autumn day in 1939 when our Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain told us that Herr Hitler hadn’t written so we were
at war. We were sitting round the powerful radio my dad bought so that he could hear
the Orkney fishermen - and on one
glorious occasion the Queen Mother -,swearing on the ship-to-shore radio. He always reckoned the
Queen Mother had a wider vocabulary.

Later in the war we
listened nightly to another broadcast from Berlin of Lord Haw Haw, a loquacious
traitor, telling us we were going to lose the war. It was quite unnerving
because he would find the home addresses of various Britons and tell them there
was a special bomb for them which would be delivered within a week.

My father had joined The Royal Scots when he was 15 in 1914.
He served alongside his father and three
of his brothers. Another brother was on his way to join them but his train was
involved in the Gretna Green train crash and we still have the brass plaque the
Government sent to the families of the war dead. Naturally, as an expert, my father took the war very seriously. All families were
issued with Anderson air raid shelters, steel huts which families had to erect
in the garden. That was not enough for my father. He buried ours three foot
deep in a large pit, then covered the pit with a two foot thick ‘roof’ of
concrete.

“There you are,” he told me proudly as he posed for a
photograph. “Not only bombproof. Waterproof as well.”

Alas, it was also water-tight as we discovered a year or so
later when the bombing started and he pushed me in, to find it had become an
underground pond and I bobbed twice to
the surface before he was able to grab my shirt collar and drag me out.

The upshot was we spent the bombing years sharing a shelter
with Mrs Cobbold and her daughter Olive across the way. I do not remember much
about the bombing but will never forget the first sight of a female bosom when
Olive undressed in the confined space we shared.

The other benefit of the war was that it taught me a deep and
lifelong mistrust of Government. We were told that all our aluminium domestic utensils were
needed for melting down to make Spitfires. Park gates and iron railings went to
build tanks. After the war the Government came clean. Neither utensils nor park
furniture would have been made into weapons. It was the Government's way of
getting us involved in the war. I often wonder how much it got for the scrap.

Then there was the matter of carrots. The Ministry of Information announced the reason our fighter pilots could see in the dark was
that they were fed exclusively on carrots. Anxious to improve my chances of
getting in the Forces I ate piles of carrots a steeple chaser could not jump
over. After a week of carrot chewing I waited for darkness, stepped out of the
back door and barked my shins on the dustbin. It was only after the war that we
discovered the story was invented to use up a glut of carrots.

We spent every night
for the next year in the Cobbolds' shelter. We would wait for the sirens to go
which were followed by a Niagara of lavatories being flushed. Followed by the
shout of newly married Mrs Cooper at Number 32 to her husband:“Willis, put your
trousers on.” It was odd. Whatever time the sirens went they caught Willis trouserless
and my mother glanced significantly at Mrs Cobbold who blushed, becomingly.

My mother took a subjective view of the war. She noticed that
both Chamberlain and Hitler had moustaches and was proud of the fact that Mr
Chamberlain’s was the more militant. She was always convinced that the Head of
the Luftwaffe, Marshal Goering, was in
the aeroplane that bombed Maycroft Avenue, where we lived, and wondered how
anyone so fat could squeeze into a cockpit.

We children thought being bombed every night was great fun and
made huge collections of shrapnel and the fins of incendiary bombs. We knew where
to look because whenever a shoal dropped our fathers rushed out with stirrup
pumps to douse them with water they carried in buckets and frequently spilled in
their haste. Usually after they had refilled the bucket the fire had burned out
leaving only the fins.

Going to school the next morning brought the other side of
warfare. We passed house after house which had suffered a direct hit and some
from which the front walls had been sheared off, exposing the rooms behind them
with all the furniture, down to the ornaments on the sideboards, still eerily in
place.

At school there were more empty desks in the classrooms most
mornings as the casualty list mounted. But when school endedwe scrabbled throughthe ruins of our dead friends’ houses looking
for shrapnel.

(to be mercilessly continued).

READERS LETTERS

My learned friend Revel Barker, sometime Managing
Editor and Consiglieri to the late Robert Maxwell of the Daily Mirror and Editor
of the European writes:

Because it was said that Jesus was
laid in a manger, the animals were simply assumed for the story development -
and of course the later artwork.

In fact, in 'Biblical architecture'
it was the norm for the animals to be on the ground floor, and the residents
upstairs. The animals provided warmth, and handy food, and fresh milk, etc.

In the Bible there's no mention of an
inn (no room at the...) or a stable or a cave. Just the manger, to fire the
imagination.

As Bob Maxwell once said to me:
"We are not in the business of flattering f...... krauts", but a
better query for the Pope to have kicked off might be: What has Bethlehem to do
with anything?

The plot is that Joseph had to return
to the home of his fathers for a census.

Roman records, normally reliably thorough,
don't mention a Jewish census any time around the date when BC became AD.

More to the point - a census isn't
about where your family came from. It's about how many people live where... in
the present day.

In a Roman census, people were
counted where they lived.

So for somebody to live in Nazareth,
but go to Bethlehem to be counted because that's where his ancestors came from,
is nonsense.

Worse, for a man to trek all that way
with a heavily pregnant wife is even greater nonsense.

It's about 80 miles, and
via belligerent Samaria.

(The Bible doesn't mention a donkey.)

In Roman-Judaic rule, the man would
provide the information on behalf of his entire family. Women had nothing to do
with it (except to be counted).

Bethlehem, of course, was put into
the story only so that Jesus could be "born in David's City"... and
providing the bloodline from David to Jesus.

Joseph was supposedly a
direct descendant of King David.

Fair enough.

Except, according to the version that
the Pope accepts... he wasn't the blood father of Jesus. So Bethlehem is a
Jewish insertion (to provide a Messiah), not a Christian one.

The Christians, of course, call him
Jesus of Nazareth.

Not Jesus of Bethlehem.

Perhaps they know more than they're
saying.

NOTE TO THE VATICAN: The Pope has
Revel’s permission to use the above in
his Christmas Message.

What makes you think your Lusty Ladies won't see
the gaslight of night, Skiddy? Said ladies currently lie upon my desk, and I
assure you that they'll have a fair doing-to and fully revealed in all their
naughtiness almost before you can say Madam Whiplash. There'll just be a
different publishing house logo on the editions now. Everyone should have a
lusty lady in the library. Bestests. Neil

A FINAL THOUGHT

The Leveson Inquiry has ended with the expected
vilification of the press and the police whirewashed. I am surorised no one has
noted that it was the Media who produced the evidence which prompted the
inquiry. An earlier reluctant inquiry was curtailed by the Metropoliton police. It was only after the press, led by the Guardian, had made a fuss about the cover up that a new
inquiry was set up. The result is that 90 newspapermen and establishment
figures are facing possible jail sentences, The News of the World has closed down
with the loss of 300 jobs and around £2 million has been paid by newspapers to
victims. Proof, surely, that existing law is protection enough?

1 comment:

The fact is that Nazareth itself is most unlikely even to have existed, even as a single farmstead, before the Third Century CE, Skiddy. You and Revel might enjoy a visit to a website and forum for classical archaeologists I help moderate at www.historyhuntersinternational.org. Although pretty academic and often way over my head, even after forty-odd years of informal but hefty study, everything there is strictly evidence-based. Quite an eye-opener is that place. Cheers. Neil